You're developing a knot in the bottom of your stomach. It's not because your son didn't make it to the best peewee baseball team. It's not because your daughter fell during her last dance recital. It's because you've got this feeling that your SharePoint project is in trouble, but you can't quite put your finger on why.
SharePoint projects are very complex. They require a large number of skills to be done correctly. In some ways they resemble ERP package implementation projects. These are the same projects that have a relatively high failure rate. So here are seven signs that your SharePoint project is in trouble and some thoughts on how to put it back on track. With careful scrutiny you can keep your SharePoint project from being a statistic.
Warning #1: You require a large amount of process change
Newton's first law is "A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force." In other words, change isn't natural. It happens as a response to an external pressure or force. SharePoint might be an external force encouraging change, but that doesn't mean the humans it is affecting will accept it.
As a rule, organizations don't like change. Sure they might pay it some lip service, but when it comes down to actually making the change there is always a lot of resistance. In general, the great the change SharePoint is introducing, the more resistance you'll get. .
If your SharePoint project has to make large changes to the process, plan for a large evangelism activity to sell why the users need to embrace the change. Many organizations try to use the management -enforcement approach. The problem with this approach is it will wane after months of user adoption not happening the way they want it to. Much like a politician is forced to conform their views to those of the people they represent, management will waver in its resolve that SharePoint is the right solution.
You can't force people to work a different way if they don't want it. In other words, the old cliché holds true, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." Work with the proverbial carrot by preparing evangelism activities. Work hard to make everyone OK with the tools and even harder to make them OK with the process changes.
Warning #2: Your defaults encourage bad behavior
In nature, things tend to take the path of least resistance. In organizations, the path of least resistance is centered on how you create the defaults. If the default for your organization is to cause Microsoft Word to open to the user's home directory on the network, this is where most people will store their documents -- even if those documents are useful to their group and aren't in any way private or personal.
In implementations where collaboration is crucial, changing something as simple as the default storage location in Microsoft Word can make a big difference in how well the solution is used. Creating defaults throughout the organization -- from setting a browser home page to setting the default directory for Microsoft Word -- can have a big impact on how your system is used.
Look for every opportunity to encourage the right behavior by setting default directories, default home pages, permissions, etc. in a way that encourages the behavior you want.